In Market Democracy I asserted that "there seems to be some insights burbling up in the infosphere that relate to the experts/expertise distinctions discussed in several earlier posts", but that more thought was needed. I'm still reading and thinking, lately about some old wisdom that is being regurgitated and chewed some more.

In a review of Elena Gorokhova’s memoir of childhood in the Soviet Union, there’s a quote of her youthful realization about Communism:

“The rules are simple…They lie to us, they know we know they’re lying, but they keep lying anyway, and we keep pretending to believe them.”

Here in the gathering twilight of 21st Century America, the situation is hardly much different, with one exception: we seem to want the lies, we compete to outdo the power elite with our own tall tales, we luxuriate in the drowning filth of our fabulistic excesses. . .

We lie to us, we know we’re lying, we know we know we’re lying, but we keep on lying anyway, and we keep on pretending to believe ourselves. . .

For our own velvet revolution, for at least a possibility of moving the ball forward past this stagnant, curdled moment in American life, I think what we’ll all have to do is take the risk of authenticity, to develop a grown-up taste for the rough edges and honest imperfections of lives as they are lived. In our politicians, in our public figures, in ourselves. To stop carrying water for liars or telling simplified fabulisms because we think that will serve some end that we deem necessary. To drop our deflector shields. Living and speaking within a world of acknowledged ambiguity, uncertainty, and imperfection is an end in and of itself.

Otherwise, 21st Century American life is going to amount to just us, the online comments threads, and those wonderful people out there in the dark…a long slow fading as we dreamily revisit over and over again our old glories, waiting endlessly for our close-up.

Said another way:

The Obama administration succumbed, like many others, to a sort of magical climate thinking that promised a painless and even prosperous transition to a low-carbon future with the tools already at hand. . .

... sooner had the president's stimulus program demonstrated that a new way forward on climate change and energy might be possible, then the new administration relinquished its climate change and energy policy to the partisans of the past. . .

Putting Browner, a former Al Gore aide, in charge of climate-change policy was payback to environmental groups and the green donors who had supported Obama's campaign. But it also signaled that, inside the White House, the clean energy investment message that the president had used to such great effect in winning battleground states like Ohio and Colorado was seen as just that: a powerful message to use in the campaign, not a policy priority.

In this, Obama was following two decades of magical thinking among both greens and liberal Democrats about energy technology. In this view, energy efficiency pays for itself, solar and wind power are already nearly cost competitive with fossil fuels, and both can quickly and cheaply reduce emissions. This Pollyanna view of fossil fuel alternatives and efficiency, which makes going green seem cheap and easy -- little more than the cost of "a postage stamp a day" -- has provided the justification for green-policy advocacy that has overwhelmingly focused on pollution regulations and carbon pricing while ignoring serious investment in energy research and development.

The price of Obama's failure to break with green climate orthodoxy is only now becoming apparent. The collapse of international climate negotiations in Copenhagen last month was just the latest evidence that efforts to regulate global pollution output cannot succeed. The Kyoto framework, which imagined that carbon pollution limits could be the primary driver of the complete transformation of the global energy economy, has irretrievably failed.

The real technological obstacles to decarbonizing the global economy today represent an insurmountable obstacle to political efforts to limit carbon emissions. Until policymakers get serious about addressing the central technological challenge, all efforts to control carbon emissions are doomed.

Both of those posts say other things that are worth your attention. Some of what they say supports the argument that I made in Weak Tea about the significance of the Tea Party phenomenon.

The supposedly educated classes believe their own bullshit, mistake rhetoric for reality, maps for territories, models for instantiated systems. The tea people are reacting to the absurdity of the free floating naked emperors because they are for reality, territories and the instantiated systems where real people actually live and work.

The educated classes are dreamy, irresponsible children. We indulge them somewhat since on rare occasion useful truths come from the mouths of babes. The dreamers need to come back to earth a bit and develop a more accurate self image. They are free to dream because there are sober adults on duty to provision and protect them.

Calls for daring authenticity and more realistic thinking express similar sentiments. We have become cultural nihilists.

Lacking any power to effect reality, Copenhagen has thus become a kind of spiritual pilgrimage. But the pilgrimage is postmodern and the faith is bad.

European delegates will pretend to have reduced emissions and other nations will pretend to believe them. Obama will promise to reduce emissions by 17 percent even though he has neither the votes nor a policy to do so. China will issue a promise to reduce the growth of its emissions even though it is identical to business-as-usual projections.

The result is what the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche described over a century ago as cultural nihilism, something that happens when the old systems of meaning -- God, progress, nature, science -- lose their power. We no longer believe in them, but we continue to behave as though we do.

Nihilism is the phenomenon of going to church, saying confession, and sometimes even praying to God, even though you no longer believe that God will do anything for you. Climate nihilism is the phenomenon of going to Copenhagen, promising to reduce emissions and pretending to believe the promises, even neither though you nor anybody around you has any intention, plan or funding to do so. . .

lying would require, as Princeton philosopher Harry Frankfurt observed in his essay "On Bullshit," a concern for the truth that is nowhere evident. The nihilist/bullshitter keeps going to his church -- either of God or of Science -- and keeps making promises without care for whether he can keep them.

In a world that appears to be increasingly without meaning, the nihilist can claim that something means anything, and that nothing means everything. As free-floating signifiers in a simulacrum, images and words can be used outside of their original context by the nihilist/bullshitter for whatever purpose he chooses.

There's no sense in me writing about these things. These guys do it better. It's not clear that there is any value in these mashups of excerpts from the writing of others except as notes to myself written in this public journal that I can refer to in future. My apologies for failing to make any creative contributions but one must be realistic. Read the originals.